Yesterday a friend sent a link to a YouTube video about a guerilla dance show (though it is a commercial designed for spreading through the bloggosphere and I now fall prey, it is a very good one). He wrote:

“This happened at Liverpool Metro Station on January 15th, 2009. Everyone went to work in a greatest positive mood afterwards. 70 Dancers mixed up with the commuters that were slowly integrated to the ongoing dance. The show had been rehearsed for 8 weeks without the public knowing. It all for a T-Mobile commercial. “Life’s for Sharing” reads the final motto. If we could only comprehend that Spirituality is all about BEING; not Doing…”

It reminded me of the video on Dancing around the World I blogged about some time ago.

From the video (T-mobile)

Another very nice commercial I got today is Coca Cola Open Happiness.

Enjoy!

From the Coke-Spot

The recent bi-weekly newsletter of The Soul Journey (I have written a post about it before) on “Being Authentic and Telling the Truth” has very interesting thoughts on the ways how people present what they consider to be the truth – giving a specific spin to their presentation and leaving parts away when they don’t fit into the picture to be presented. This is a very common feature especially of marketing and of PR-campaigns, no matter from which field. It remembered me of the campaigns Swiss banks, especially UBS, are doing at the moment to regain the trust of the customers. An extract of the newsletter:

“We live in a world of communications – media of all sorts that reach around the world, into our work places and into our living rooms and bedrooms. People with agendas to serve, often self-serving, use these media to try to convince as many people as possible to believe the ‘truth’ they are presenting.

In recent times there have been elections in which candidates for high offices have held debates. The greatest influence of these debates has not been directly to people’s minds, because people don’t pay enough attention or use their own sense to understand sufficiently to make up their minds about what they hear. That is part of the problem. The other part is that politicians, like other people, do not always tell the truth, or they distort the truth, and most people do not know what the facts are. The result of all this is that people wait to make up their minds from what the media presents. The media tells them who won the debate, who was better, etc.

There are two things we need to be aware of when listening to others telling what they consider to be the truth:

1. The spin. Facts are taken and presented with a specific spin, a specific interpretation, to suit the one presenting them. The spin is determined by the agendas, the motives, and the goals of those presenting them. So the objective facts are seldom revealed as such.

2. Perception Management. This is similar but more insidious than spin. It is not just a manipulating of the facts, but a complete ignoring of the facts. Perception management, for example, presents greed masquerading as compassion and generosity; air pollution, water pollution and other forms of corruption are packaged attractively as social benefits; making war in order to establish peace, making up euphemisms like soft targets and collateral damage to hide the hideousness of immoral behaviour involving killing innocent people. Perception management involves falsehood and deception, the purpose of which is to get others to believe what one wishes them to believe, whatever the truth may be. It is no wonder that it has been described as ‘information warfare’ since the term was first used by the U.S. military. It is now widely used by whomever has motivation to influence many and the means of doing so, particularly through the media.

Always be wary of the propaganda you are exposed to regardless of where it is coming from. Always see through it to the motivations and heart of those presenting it. If there is power or money at stake behind the messages, you can be sure you are being exposed to spin and/or perception management. Once you recognize this, and understand what is going on, you can dismiss it and, if possible, identify the truth that is being distorted or hidden.

At the very least trust your heart, your soul, to know when someone is trying to manipulate the truth. And then stand for the truth as you know it. Be courageous and be authentic!

Exercises:
Make it a practice to examine at least one message a day that comes to you from others directly or through the media. Ask yourself to sense what the motivations are of the presenter, and what truth or facts are involved. Ask yourself to what extent the truth is being distorted or completely hidden. Then decide what you want to do – accept, reject, or stand for something else.

Go beyond just understanding and attain more perspectives, experiences and integration to enable you to heal the past and create the future.”

St. Michael fighting the dragon on top of the townhall of Brussels, with an airplane passing by like a comet

Christmas is the time for business partners to exchange standardized, automatic greetings, often void of any deeper sense. A few of these also arrived in my office. Some want to impress (or bribe?) partners by the value of their gifts, while others give their gift to a social institution. One card I got was of a different kind saying that instead of Christmas present they prefer giving the money to micro-credit institutions financing grass-root economics in developing countries.

Another agency sends every year very interesting small Christmas greetings. This year it was a little self-made booklet entitled “Money – Magic, Mathematics, Soap Bubble?”, together with a bill of “One Talent“, an alternative currency of the Initiative for a Natural Economic Order INWO in Switzerland, inspired by Silvio Gesell.

Besides some short sketches of fairy-tales involving remuneration like that of Mother Hulda or The Star Money, the role of money in different religions and the development of money and digital money, the booklet containes a very interesting visualisation  of the momentary financial crisis:

To save the UBS-bank, Swiss government has given 66 billion Swiss francs. As a pile of hundred Swiss Francs bills, this is a pile of 79.2 kilometers height. For fighting the crisis in the States, the government has promised 8 trillion US$. This is an 8 with 12 zeros, or a pile of hundred dollar notes towering to 9.600 kilometers height (or about 6.000 miles). This sum is without the recent money promised to the automobile industry… An incredible financial Tower of Babel.

Quite impressive, but not the height of the towers of money – the TV-tower in Barcelona, Spain.

This morning while doing some shoppings in the city of Berne I discovered some nice shop window scenes. I love these “kitsch as kitsch can”-sceneries. The Indian Gods on tour in Swiss shop window decorations – what a colourful meeting.

Reflections of reflections – passers-by and display dummies

Non-attachment in the shop display: The Buddha meditating

The child Krishna playing, accompanied with some Sarasvathis, and Durga listening in the back, on a tiger

Hanuman between some vases – ready to serve

Shiva and Parvathi with Ganesha between the storage racks

Shiva sitting on a lotus, with his drum and kamandulu (bowl), surrounded by serpents (symbols of time), blessing the photographer.

Krishna playing flute, with Nandi at his feet.

Rama, Sita, Lakshmana and Hanuman in a boat, surrounded by white horses

Sarasvathi, the Goddess of the Word and of Wisdom, sitting on the white swan (symbol of respiration), playing veena (instrument with 7 strings, symbolising the 7 planes, the music of creation).

Another statue of Hanuman, in deep devotion

Enchanting Krishna, playing the music of the soul

Riding through the ocean of shopping illusions

Melancholic angel: When shall I be redeemed from this boring shop existence?

Harlekin pondering on the mysteries of commercialism

I just read the latest issue of the Swiss “NZZ-folio” magazine the topic of which is “For Free – Business Model of the Future?“. Some articles show how people get blinded when they hear that they can get something for free – they forget that normally there is a catch in it. Free newspapers, free phones, free drinks,  – there are many ways of seducing and of capturing the attention.

Of course little value is often attached to things which are given for free or for half the price, and on the web it is nearly taken for granted that you get content or a lot of software for free. The motives of doing so vary – personal satisfaction, making a name for oneself, getting people attracted to some other offer… There are enterprises engaged in philanthropic activities, where there is no financial “return on investment”, but a gain in reputation. But the self-related motives remain, though they might not be visible at the first sight.

There are people doing service activities with a selfless motive, or even without a motive at all. This way of acting is not catchy. But the thing is that by receiving benefits you remain in a receptive mood and get into passivity. You have to give something so that the flow of energy doesn’t get stuck with you.  You might like to read more about the power of giving in the issue on Giving and Taking of the Good Will in Action. And you might be interested in our free distribution of wisdom books or our free newsletter –  this kind of “hooking” isn’t dangerous 🙂

Wisdom is flowing for free, for those who are really seeking it from the right sources and use it for the right purposes.

When you just receive without giving in one way or the other you create attachment and remain a beggar. Photo by a friend, India 07.

Three days ago I got an e-mail from the webmaster of the site “Wicca & Esoteric Library“. He had seen the publications of the Circle of Good Will and asked if we would like to publish articles in his library: It is a “totally free resource and will stay so for as long as I can keep it online.”

I had a look at the site and thought, why not. Though there are quite a lot of “adds by Google” all around the published texts (clicking on them will cause costs for the advertisers and makes the cash tills ring with the site owner and with Google), but maybe this way some people will find the wisdom teachings which wouldn’t stumble across them otherwise.

I wrote to him, that I could contribute some articles, but since all of them are written on the basis of the wisdom teachings, especially those of Master KPK (Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar) and Master EK (Dr. Ekkirala Krishnamacharya), they should not go under my name, but under “Circle of Good Will”.

This wasn’t what they had designed: He answered, I could take one of the names of the Masters as the author, since for legal purposes he needs the name of the author. I replied that this isn’t possible either: I have reframed the texts, without changing the content, by taking parts from many publications, often unpublished notes. From a “worldly legal side” I might be considered to be the author, from a spiritual point of view, however, I’m not and I would never claim it to be, because it is not my content, even though I am entitled to use the texts.

Finally we found a way – that I accept the legal responsibility associated with publishing these articles on the site, by adding the related details in their admin-space. This information is not visible to the outside. As per the details under the general information, I can add something about the Circle of Good Will.

Having these points – and some others – cleared, I added a few articles to different sections of the library. Three of them have been reviewed and published by now, some others probably will follow soon. You might have a look here, here and here. But all these articles and many more you find in a better formatted form as pdfs on the Good-Will site.

“The Writer” in a doll’s house, after Carl Spitzweg’s famous painting “The Poor Poet“.

I normally don’t do „corporate marketing” in this blog, but today I got a news release announcing a new way of communication to cross language barriers, which sounds very fascinating:

Together with IBM, the phone company Jajah has just started today a real-time free phone translation service called Jajah Babel that allows anyone in China, the U.S., UK and Australia to call a local number, speak in English and immediately hear the message back in Chinese Mandarin. It also works the other way round. So you can simply hand your phone to the other person or put the phone on loudspeaker, so they hear the message.

I wonder how the system manages to understand the ambiguities of language, which automatic translation programs don’t hit (for example: “Bill Gates” as the bill for the doors…), but nevertheless it is a great step ahead in finding a way out of Babylon.

This week I read in the Swiss magazine “MK – Marketing und Kommunikation” an article about “LOHAS continue to be on the rise”. I never heard about LOHAS, a marketing target group, before. Wikipedia describes it as “an acronym for Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability that refers to a demographic defining a particular market segment related to sustainable living, “green” ecological initiatives, and generally composed of a relatively upscale and well-educated population segment.” Another variety is LOVOS, “an acronym for Lifestyles of Voluntary Simplicity which are oriented to health and sustainability, and are critical of consumption and consumerism.”

Oh, I thought, now they have a scheme into which they can put me in their profiling. For I discover elements of LOHAS lifestyle as well as LOVOS. The MK article describes the LOHAS that they are very web-affine, have priorities in environmental questions, social responsibility and awareness. Trustworthiness is very important to them and they don’t easily believe what marketeers say, but orient more with the opinion of family and friends. When they are convinced, they stay with a product, and with an enterprise that sells it. If the enterprise, however, behaves irresponsible, they won’t buy it. And the percentage of LOHAS is increasing.

The article started with the lines: “Change of values. The central task of marketing lies in defining, creating, conveying and transmitting values. What happens, however, when the values in the society change and new lifestyles are forming?” Poor marketeers, hurry up to orient towards deeper values. It seems their claiming of “defining, creating, conveying and transmitting values” is an empty effort, when the society doesn’t behave the way they would like it to have, and the marketeers are running behind.

Hopefully people will come to the point of orienting more towards the real needs and not get caught by the desires foamed by marketing strategies, like it is still often the case. May they get more and more waterproof towards the temptations of the guild of market criers.

Putting posters on an advertising pillar

Last week I saw an article in the latest number of a German web-marketing journal about measuring user engagement on websites. The question which occupies the marketeers is: How to get people into an engagement, for example on a website, and start to do something.

The marketing specialist agree that it is most important to incite engagement, but it seems to be quite difficult to measure it: If you can quantify engagement, then you can put a price tag on it and benchmark the reactions you get, invest in raising the level of engagement and the like.

A comment in a blogpost by “Scobleizer” (Robert Scoble, the ex-Microsoft “evangelist”) from 2006 entitled: New audience metrics needed: Engagement, lists, what engagement is about and what might be measured:

1. Reactions (they heard you)
2. Learning (they understood and retained)
3. Transfer (they took in the information and can apply)
4. Results (they use the learning to achieve a goal)

There is a lot of discussion about this topic on the web, but these simple lines very well hit the point of engagement, also in the context of wisdom teachings – though measuring is more than strange in this context: Many people hear something about the inner path (point 1), some get interested and start reading about it (point 2), and this for a longer time.

A few of these transfer it into a practice (point 3) and start training themselves. Of these few again a small group really commits itself to continuous engagement, taking up a regular schedule, combined with some kind of service activities and diving into a deeper understanding of the teachings with studies.

Many quit their initial engagement half way through or get lost in some side-track or the other. In the Eastern scriptures it says, out of 1000 one person changes from one level to the other – from hearing to getting interested, to starting practice, to getting into engagement. So it is 1000 x 1000 x 1000.

The percentage of those who set upon a focused spiritual journey along the guiding lines seems to be very low (marketeers would be very much frustrated…), and hopefully it scores a bit higher. But it also says that the goal of a spiritual teacher is reached, when he finds a fistful who really apply and reach the goal and take up the torch of teaching themselves.

Have a look at “Basics of Spiritual Life” on “The Teacher-Student Principle“.

Which way to take with engagement – turn to commitment, or pass on, or stay undetermined?

In a German internet marketing magazine I saw a note about the American site “Christvertising“, which describes itself with the following words:

“Christvertising is a network of communication specialists and advertsing professionals which help you navigate through the maze that is the world of competitive brands. If you like your product, so do we, but more importantly, so does God. We believe that nothing is possible without the Lord’s blessing and consent. Your product is no exception. May God bless your Brand.”

And: “Christvertising manages a network of creative, innovative, and pro-active believers, who will help you, through intensive prayer, improve your brand in the eyes of the Lord. If God loves your brand, it will become stronger and more successful. Cristvertising helps you access the power of brand-targeted prayer (BTP™) using our unique, isosceles approach to marketing: Reach – Connect – Pray.” …. “Ask yourself this simple question: Is your brand in God’s good books?”

Prayers are very helpful on the spiritual path, they can orient us to the Divine – not from the intellect, but from the heart. However, using prayer to bribe God and exploit him for marketing purposes is one more expression of our excessively materialistic time.

Hands of a Buddha statue, photo of a friend